Wednesday, May 23, 2012

This Feb. 27, 2012 photo released by the State Attorney's
Office shows George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch
volunteer who shot Trayvon Martin. The photo and reports
were among evidence released by prosecutors that also
includes calls to police, video and numerous other documents.
The package was received by defense lawyers earlier this
week and released to the media on Thursday, May 17, 2012.

In a city hall forum in 2011, George Zimmerman criticized Sanford police as lazy, saying he knew because he had ridden along with cops.

A year before George Zimmerman killed a Miami Gardens teenager, he stood before a City Hall community forum with a grievance: Sanford cops are lazy, he told the then-mayor elect.

The community college criminal justice major said he knew because he went on ride-alongs with the Sanford Police.

“And what I saw was disgusting,” Zimmerman said, according to a clip of a recording of the January 2011 meeting obtained by The Miami Herald. “The officer showed me his favorite hiding spots for taking naps, explained to me that he doesn’t carry a long gun in his vehicle because, in his words, ‘anything that requires a long gun requires a lot of paperwork, and you’re going to find me as far away from it.’

“He took two lunch breaks and attended a going away party for one of his fellow officers. READ MORE

The latest controversy over Florida’s stand-your-ground law concerns a
defendant who argued without success that the defense should bar her
prosecution.

Jurors deliberated only 12 minutes before convicting Marissa
Alexander of Jacksonville, Fla., who says she fired a warning shot in an
attempt to scare off her abusive husband, report the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press and the Florida Times-Union. She was convicted of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and sentenced earlier this month to 20 years in prison.

A judge had refused to bar the prosecution based on Alexander’s claim
she had immunity because of the state’s stand-your-ground law.

The case stems from an August 2010 incident. Alexander had gone to
her former home to retrieve her belongings, and encountered her
estranged husband there, Time
magazine reports. He went into a rage after discovering texts to
another man, she says, and threatened her. She went out to her truck,
was unable to open the locked garage door, and got her gun from the
vehicle, according to her account. She went back inside and fired. The
bullet hit the wall. READ MORE

Evidence released last week in the second-degree-murder case against George Zimmerman shows four key witnesses made major changes in what they say they saw and heard the night he fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford.
Three
changed their stories in ways that may damage Zimmerman. A fourth
abandoned her initial story, that she saw one person chasing another.
Now, she says, she saw a single figure running.

Martin’s blood contained THC, which is the psychoactive ingredient in
marijuana, according to an autopsy conducted February 27 — the day after
the teenager was shot dead.
Toxicology tests found elements of the drug in the teenager’s chest
blood — 1.5 nanograms per milliliter of one type (THC), as well as 7.3
nanograms of another type (THC-COOH) — according to the medical
examiner’s report. There was also a presumed positive test of
cannabinoids in Martin’s urine. It was not immediately clear how
significant these amounts were.
Concentrations of THC routinely rise to 100 to 200 ng/ml after
marijuana use, though it typically falls to below 5 ng/ml within three
hours of it being smoked, according to information on the National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s website.
While some states have zero-tolerance policies for any drug traces
for driving while impaired, others set certain benchmarks, the website
of California’s Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs notes. In
Nevada, that equates to 2 ng/ml for THC and 5 ng/ml for THC-COOH — also
known as marijuana metabolite. The cutoff level in Ohio is 2 ng/ml for
THC and 50 ng/ml for THC-COOH. READ MORE

Even
in the wake of Obama's “evolution” on marriage last week, some critics
seized on his statement that the states should decide whether to offer
gay and lesbian Americans equal treatment under the law.

Yet
it is only the courts – not the executive or legislative branches –
that can require the states to honor same-sex marriages. And actions
speak louder than words.

This week, Chris Geidner, senior political editor for the LGBT magazine Metro Weekly,
appeared on the AlterNet Radio Hour to highlight where the
administration has missed opportunities to advance gay civil rights, and
to explain how the administration has been working to advance marriage
equality nationwide in the courts – out of the glare of the political
press. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the interview (you can
listen to the whole show here). READ MORE

JPMorgan Chase losing $2 billion on a risky trade has many
pundits calling for more regulation. But they're still missing so much
of the story.

May 16, 2012

Reading over the coverage of
JPMorgan Chase’s $2 billion fiasco, it’s impossible not to be reminded
of the heady early days of the Lesser Depression. Not because the scale
or risk is equivalent, but because the naked hubris, incompetence and
greed on display have once again stirred up a regulatory fervor among
large swaths of the media.

All of a sudden pundits and editorial boards
are sounding less like Paul Ryan and more like Paul Krugman. There are
also the predictable right-wing hacks who claim this episode somehow
makes the case against the Volcker Rule, the part of Dodd-Frank that
bans commercial banks from engaging in speculative bets to increase
their own profits, known as “proprietary trading.”

But
unfortunately that’s usually where it ends. The issue remains framed
through a partisan lens: you can either be in favor of implementing
existing regulation or against it, but few voices move beyond those
narrow confines. As a result, regulation gets discussed as an important
but isolated issue, largely removed from more fundamental problems like
income inequality and the power corporations exert over both parties.READ MORE

I can now say that I’ve used a turn-of-the-century vibrator — on my hand, but still.

The
silver, hand-cranked contraption is usually kept behind glass at Good
Vibrations’ Antique Vibrator Museum in San Francisco — but staff
sexologist Carol Queen made a rare exception. “This is very special,”
she whispered, unlocking the case and carefully pulling out Dr.
Johansen’s Auto Vibrator, a relic from 1904. The “auto” part is not so
much: It was a two-person job, with her having to crank the device’s
handle to get it thrumming. Pressing my finger tips to its inch-wide
circular platform of pleasure, I was pleasantly surprised by its power.

As
I was by the two other vintage vibrators that I got to try out — the
White Cross Electric Vibrator from 1917, which has a pronged aperture
that makes it seem like the ancestor of Jimmyjane’s Form 2, and the Beautysafe Vibrator from the 1940s, which is reminiscent in look, feel and sound to a car waxer.

We
voted for him over the former Ebay CEO, rightwing Republican Meg
Whitman, who promised to fire 40,000 public workers and end welfare,
mainly because Brown trailed nostalgic clouds of progressive glory. A
one-time governor himself, he banked on us remembering that he is also
the semi-hippie son of a much-loved 1960s two-term governor, his dad Pat
Brown. Since Jerry’s election, using the flim-flam Houdini magic of
“slimming down the deficit”, he has behaved like Mitt Romney – or Meg
Whitman – or any other business CEO slashing and burning at the most
vulnerable in programs for the poor, disabled, community-college
students and just about all of us who are not rich. READ MORE

A change of power requires a destruction of corporate
domination and a new mechanism of governance to distribute wealth and
foster the common good.

May 15, 2012

In Robert E. Gamer’s book “The Developing Nations”
is a chapter called “Why Men Do Not Revolt.” In it Gamer notes that
although the oppressed often do revolt, the object of their hostility is
misplaced.

They vent their fury on a political puppet, someone who
masks colonial power, a despised racial or ethnic group or an apostate
within their own political class. The useless battles serve as an
effective mask for what Gamer calls the “patron-client” networks that
are responsible for the continuity of colonial oppression. The squabbles
among the oppressed, the political campaigns between candidates who
each are servants of colonial power, Gamer writes, absolve the actual
centers of power from addressing the conditions that cause the
frustrations of the people. READ MORE

New York’s marijuana arrests, says a growing chorus of
critics, are a prime example of how the nation’s drug laws
disproportionately impact black and Latino communities.

May 15, 2012

Every morning, several sheets of
paper are posted to the walls outside the arraignment rooms of New York
City’s Borough Courts. They list the names of the accused scheduled to
appear before the judge and the legal codes of their offenses. On most
days and across the city’s five boroughs, these lists include multiple
names next to the numbers 221.10. This is the legal code for the
misdemeanor charge of possessing small amounts of marijuana “open to
public view,” meaning the public display or public smoking of pot. In
2010, more than 50,000 New Yorkers were arrested for violating 221.10.
The number represented 15 percent of all arrests made by the NYPD and allowed the city to keep its crown of Marijuana Arrest Capital of the World.

Not
that there is a credible challenger for the dubious honor. The high
number of 221.10 arrests puts New York in a league of its own and has
become a lightning rod in the national debate over race and the war on
drugs. New York’s marijuana arrests, says a growing chorus of critics,
are a prime example of how the nation’s drug laws disproportionately
impact black and Latino communities.

This
is decreasingly a matter of accusation and anecdote. Hard data are
emerging that confirm what marijuana reform advocates and public
defenders have long maintained: That the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy in
high-crime neighborhoods — sold to the public as a way to find illegal
guns and reduce violent crime — has instead resulted in racially
uneven drug law enforcement practices that seem to violate the spirit
and the letter of New York law as well as the United States
Constitution.

From homophobic remarks to awful bills, here's a little roundup of a month of assault from the GOP.

May 17, 2012

It seems like with every cultural
step forward by the country on the whole, the right-wing has to take a
few leaps backward--and women, gays and minorities are the victims.

This
month has already brought some great moments: massive protests on May 1
and the historic cultural moment when a sitting US president endorsed
marriage equality. But simultaneously the GOP and other conservative
institutions have gone on what felt like a vengeful tear. Maybe these
racist, sexist and homophobic statements and bills really just
constitute business as usual, a continuation of the "war on women," but
in contrast to progress, it most certainly brings the term "reactionary"
into a new light.

It also shows that the war on women isn't just on women--it's on anyone who doesn't conform to rigid patriarchal gender roles.

Here’s the essence of it: you can
trust America’s crème de la crème, the most elevated, responsible
people, no matter what weapons, what powers, you put in their hands. No
need to constantly look over their shoulders.

Placed
in the hands of evildoers, those weapons and powers could create a
living nightmare; controlled by the best of people, they lead to
measured, thoughtful, precise decisions in which bad things are (with
rare and understandable exceptions) done only to truly terrible types.
In the process, you simply couldn’t be better protected.

And
in case you were wondering, there is no question who among us are the
best, most lawful, moral, ethical, considerate, and judicious people:
the officials of our national security state. Trust them implicitly.
They will never give you a bum steer.

You may be paying a fortune to maintain their world -- the 30,000
people hired to listen in on conversations and other communications in
this country, the 230,000 employees of the Department of Homeland
Security, the 854,000 people with top-secret clearances, the 4.2 million with security clearances of one sort or another, the $2 billion, one-million-square-foot data center that the National Security Agency is constructing in Utah, the gigantic $1.8 billion
headquarters the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency recently built
for its 16,000 employees in the Washington area -- but there’s a good
reason. READ MORE

By raising barriers to economic assistance and legal
recourse, the legislation sends the message to countless women living in
violent households that their place is still at home.

May 17, 2012

Women have been under economic
assault in Washington for months. Deficit hawks have taken aim at
social programs and civil rights protections that help keep women safe,
healthy and able to participate in work and community life. To some
lawmakers, none of that is more important than “saving” taxpayer
dollars—which is often shorthand for robbing working women of both
their earnings and their safety net.

The hostility toward women crested this week as conservative lawmakers pushed legislation that would gut the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).
House Bill 4970 isn't just oppressive to survivors; it attacks the
civil and social rights of all women. By raising barriers to economic
assistance and legal recourse, the legislation sends the message to
countless women living in violent households that their place is still
in the home. READ MORE

Next year Mark Zuckerberg’s base salary will
receive a dramatic pay cut—going from a base salary of $600,000 to just
one dollar.

Which raises the question: will he ever pay taxes again?

Zuckerberg’s
salary cut is being compared to similar moves by other tech titans.
Google’s Eric Schmidt and Larry Page are paid just $1 annual salaries.
Steve Jobs took just $1 in salary from 1997 until his death last year.
Other members of the one-percent/one-dollar club include Oracle’s Larry
Ellison and Hewlett-Packard’s Meg Whitman.

Zuckerberg
was paid a base salary of $500,000 in 2011 and is set to be paid a base
of $600,000 this year. He got a cash bonus of $250,000 for the first
half of 2011 and will likely receive a similar bonus for the second
half.

Interestingly,
he was alone among the top executives at Facebook who got no stock
awards for 2011. The board—which is controlled by Zuckerberg
himself—decided that he had enough stock to align his interests with the
other shareholders. With 28.2 percent of the company, you would hope
so.

Zuckerberg’s pay cut could reduce his income tax burden to nothing.

It’s
possible that he might even be eligible for certain types of government
aid for those with low-income—although it’s unlikely that he would
collect them. READ MORE

Dexter is all about U.S. foreign policy and the moral calculus of a superpower.

May 18, 2012

Everybody loves Dexter. He’s
handsome. He’s helpful. He works at the Miami Metro Police Department,
and he’s very good at his job as a blood-splatter analyst. Oh, did I
mention that he moonlights as a serial killer? Don’t worry: he only
kills bad guys. That’s part of the code that Dexter’s adoptive father,
himself a police officer, passed down to his son. As a child who had
watched his mother die a horrendous death,

Dexter couldn’t overcome the
murderous impulses that surged within him. His father, channeling those
impulses in the only constructive way he could think of, created a
better monster of his son’s nature: a serial killer of serial killers.

The
other essential rule of Dexter’s code: don’t get caught. He is very
precise in the way he dispatches his victims, and he will do almost
anything to evade detection. Dexter works for the law, but his second
job is most definitely above the law.

During its six seasons on Showtime, the popular TV show Dexter has
asked a vexing moral question: can a person do good by doing bad? Let’s
throw in one more twist. Sometimes Dexter makes mistakes and kills
people who don’t fit his definition of Really Bad. READ MORE

Writing in Rolling Stone this week, Rick Perlstein looks
at how the FBI regularly entraps and creates “terrorists” out of
anarchists and activists, while comparatively ignoring violent white
supremacist groups.

Using
some recent examples, Perlstein paints a startling picture. He notes
the arrest this month of a small group of self-identified anarchists,
participating in Occupy Cleveland, who — strung along in an FBI sting —
planned to blow up a large Ohio bridge. The target was suggested and
(fake) C-4 explosives were provided by an FBI infiltrator. As Perlstein
put it, the episode was one among numerous law enforcement schemes
since 2001 in which “the alleged terrorist masterminds end up seeming,
when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a
paper bag without law enforcement tutelage.”

Perlstein
contrasts the Ohio arrestees with another recently arrested group: The
American Front, a “known terrorist group” of Florida-based white
supremacists who — without FBI encouragement — “took a break from
training with machine guns for a race war in order to fashion weapons
out of fake ‘Occupy’ signs which they planned to use to assault May Day
protesters in Melbourne, Florida.” While anarchists, animal rights
activists and Muslims pass muster as federal targets, organized hate
groups do not. READ MORE

Across the country, states are diverting foreclosure settlement funds to plug budget holes.

May 18, 2012

It was with great fanfare that the
Obama administration, alongside nearly every state’s attorney general,
announced in February that a $25 billion accord had been reached with
the nation’s five biggest banks, settling charges that the banks engaged
in widespread foreclosure fraud. Those billions were intended to
provide relief to struggling homeowners, using the banks’ own money to
help the victims of Wall Street malfeasance.

“These
banks will put billions of dollars towards relief for families across
the nation,” President Obama said. “They’ll provide refinancing for
borrowers that are stuck in high interest rate mortgages. They’ll
reduce loans for families who owe more on their homes than they’re
worth. “

However, more than a
dozen states across the country are doing their best to undermine the
settlement by diverting the funds to other areas of their budgets.
Arizona recently became the latest state to do so, taking $50 million
meant to aid homeowners and instead plowing it into the state’s general
fund (after scrapping an earlier plan to use the money to pay for prison
construction). READ MORE

Big brewers like Anheuser-Busch
frequently admonish us imbibers of their grain products to "drink
responsibly." Well, I say back to them: Lobby responsibly.

In
particular, I point to a disgusting binge of besotted lobbying by
Anheuser-Busch (now owned by the Belgian beer conglomerate InBev) and
other beer barons this year in the Nebraska legislature.

At
issue was the "town" of Whiteclay, smack dab on the Nebraska-South
Dakota border. I put "town" in quotes because only 10 people live there
-- but it is home to four beer stores. Why? Because right across the
state line is the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation of the Oglala Sioux
tribe, which has a devastating problem of alcohol addiction among its
20,000 members, combined with intractable and dispiriting poverty.

Whiteclay
exists solely so booze peddlers can profit from the Oglala tribe's
addiction miseries. They sell more than 4 million cans of beer a year to
Pine Ridge residents! This includes literally making a killing by
peddling high-alcohol malt liquors, such as Busch's aptly named
"Hurricane High." So much for "Drink responsibly." READ MORE

The education of our children is a core cultural and
political choice that reflects the deepest differences between liberals
and conservatives.

May 18, 2012

The Conservative War On Education
continues apace, with charters blooming everywhere, high-stakes testing
cementing its grip on classrooms, and legislators and pundits wondering
what we need those stupid liberal arts colleges for anyway. (Isn't
college about job prep? Who needs to know anything about art history,
anthropology or ancient Greek?)

Amid
the din, there's a worrisome trend: liberals keep affirming right-wing
talking points, usually without realizing that they're even right wing.
Or saying things like, "The education of our children is a non-partisan
issue that should exist outside of any ideological debate."

The
hell it is. People who say stuff like this have no idea what they're
talking about. The education of our children is a core cultural and
political choice that reflects the deepest differences between liberals
and conservatives -- because every educational conversation must start
with the fundamental philosophical question: What is an education for?

Our answers to that question could not be more diametrically opposed. READ MORE

An Eastman Kodak facility had a small nuclear reactor and 3Â½ pounds of weapons-grade uranium for more than 30 years. (Associated Press / May 14, 2012)

By Matt Pearce

May 14, 2012, 3:01 p.m.

Kodak has the bomb.

… OK, not really. But according to a report from the Rochester, N.Y., Democrat and Chronicle, an Eastman Kodak facility had a small nuclear reactor and 3 ½ pounds of weapons-grade uranium for more than 30 years.

Kodak. The company that makes cameras and printers.

“It’s such an odd situation
because private companies just don’t have this material,” Miles Pomper, a
senior research associate at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in
Washington, D.C., told the Democrat and Chronicle.

No kidding. A spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
told the Los Angeles Times that the company had enriched 1,582 grams of
uranium-235 up to 93.4%, a level considered weapons-grade. Good thing
Kodak isn't in Iran; that’s the kind of thing Israel’s been threatening to go to war over.
The
company was using the reactor to check its chemicals and perform
radiography tests, the commission said, and had upgraded to its in-house
system after using one at Cornell University, according to the Democrat and Chronicle. It was reportedly guarded and monitored carefully.
Kodak, not known as one of the world’s nuclear powers, filed for bankruptcy protection in January and has been shedding some of its holdings. READ MORE